Chechnya: the "Zhirinovsky Effect"

The second anniversary celebrations of Independence Day in Grozny [in 1993] showed how bizarre independent Chechnya had become. In a military parade Dudayev had the empty cases of SS-20 missiles transported several times around Freedom Square, as if to demonstrate that he was armed with nuclear weapons. One of the guests for the independence celebrations was the Russian ultra-nationalist and presidential hopeful Vladimir Zhirinovsky. When Zhirinovsky sat down for dinner with Dudayev, Zviad Gamsakhurdia and the President of Ingushetia, Ruslan Aushev, it was dubbed `the dinner of the four Presidents'. Zhirinovsky pleased his hosts by drinking a toast to Chechen independence.

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Despite the gradual changes, many Moscow politicians were impatient for the Dudayev regime to fall as soon as possible ideally by the end of the year [1994]. Presidential elections were only two years away and Boris Yeltsin's popularity rating below 10 per cent. The old opposition had been replaced by a new threat - the rise of the extreme nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who had won the largest share of the vote in the Decermber 1993 parliamentary elections. Zhirinovsky's victory shifted Russian politics to the right; it put on the agenda the issue of a revivalist Russia and `defence' of ethnic Russians living outside Russia itself, and it coincided with an upsurge of racism in Moscow against `people of Caucasian nationality'. Chechens, Georgians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis were routinely harassed by the police. Some Kremlin advisers reasoned that a decisive strike against the Chechens would steal the nationalist vote from Zhirinovsky.

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In November 1994 pro-Yeltsin liberals like Gaidar, Kostikov and Satarov were in disarray. They found it hard to gain access to Yeltsin and complained that Korzhakov was keeping him in an 'information blockade'. Here, in the view of many political insiders, is the key to the start of the Chechen war - not in oil or a radical change in the situation on the ground, but in a shift inthe balance of Kremlin politics combined with poor intelligence from Chechnya. The hawks would have approved of a military intervention in Chechnya as their way of remaking Yeltsin in their own image and stealing the rhetoric of the nationalist opposition. In the words of Gaidar: `I have said more than once that the "Zhirinovsky effect" played a big part because of his rhetoric, his "last march to the south", and so on. It seemed that a small victorious war would be very helpful.' A small war against the 'mafiosi' Chechens would go down well with the electorate, the argumentt went, and Yeltsin would enter the lists for the 1996 presidential elections as a tough ruler whose flirtation with liberalism was finally over.

from: Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus, 1998